Winter Carnival

 

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February is the dark month, the snowy month in the deep of winter, a time to look for outdoor cheer.  Carnival brings folks out to play in the snow or to watch while dogs, horses and skiers play.  They’ve done it here in Pinedale for so long that nobody has to ask when or where or what will happen.  It brings us to the social hall at the library, they say, or the party bar where beer flows whether you pay or not.  But this year is different.  I came in a bad year, and here’s what I found.   

 

 While the horse has to stay in a straight-line track,
the skier swings from side to side.

All the indoor gatherings are cancelled, and some of the outdoor events are shortened or spread out in various antisocial manners.  But one event was not reduced or cancelled in any way—the skijoring competition!  A lot of ranchers live around here and 240 of their teams signed up.  It took two full days to get them all through the skijoring course, where a skier is pulled by a horse and often the horse kicks up so much snow that the skier can’t see where he’s going. 

 

The horseman rides like a jockey, never looking back.  
His job is make good time.  
The skier follows on a rope
and has a lot of things to maneuver.

A team consists of a rider on a horse towing a person on skis.  The horse gallops on a straight track about 1,200 feet long.  The skier turns back and forth across the track navigating a series of gates, like slalom gates in downhill skiing, or like water skiing in summer.  The skier must grab five rings from poles while speeding past them.  The fastest time wins, and time is added for each gate missed and each ring not caught.  Girls do it too, and we shall see how they fared.  

 

Winter Carnival began with the colors—flags of nation and state carried by horsemen, and high schoolers singing the national anthem.  Everyone stood at attention and nobody took a knee.  We are in Wyoming.  

 

A  horse-and-rider start and a skier heads for the first gate
(the red stake to his right.)  If a horse can gallop
at forty miles an hour, a skier veering right to
make a gate is going at least fifty.

It was another dark day in Pinedale, about zero degrees, with falling snow and fog, making photography difficult.  Most of my pictures blurred with too-long exposure times for the fast action.  I did what I could, and nobody complained.  

 

Here the skier has veered far to his left to get around a gate.  Now he must jump off that mound at near right-angle to the direction the horse and rider are going, in order to catch a ring which is hanging from a pole. 

 

Here he comes to the ring, and it looks like he’s in good position to grab it.  See the ring already on his arm; it’s from a previous pole.  

 

Another contestant is about the catch a ring in the same place.  

 

This teen-age skier is the smoothest of them all.  She glides along at fifty miles an hour as if strolling along Pine Street on prom night.  

 

As she approached these two rings, she already has two on her arm and is in good position to get two more.  

 

She gets them both while in a hard lean to her left, thinking about that next gate and getting across the horse track.

 

Her father sees none of it.  He rides fast and smoothly keeping the horse on track.  I saw her give him a hug when it was over.  

 

Winter Carnival was not all cancelled for the tough people of Pinedale.  Anyone could enter the Cardboard Classic and slide down this hill with little ability or experience.  

 

Please see maps prepared by Michael Angerman showing the places the places I stayed.

Map for the summer trip of 2020:  Michael's Map 

Map for the winter trip of 2021:   Google Map for Winter 2021